Sarah Sze at Crypta Balbi

Gagosian and Museo Nazionale Romano announce that Sarah Sze‘s sculpture “Split Stone (7:34)” (2018) by will be exhibited in the historic Crypta Balbi, concurrent with her solo show at Gagosian Gallery in Rome.
At the gallery Sze amplifies the materiality of digital images through a new series of paintings and a video installation, revealing that every figure, whether printed, projected or painted, is composed of particles of ink and light, which migrate from the screen to the canvas and then to the architecture to make the reverse path.
In “Split Stone (7:34)” the artist immortalises in pixel the fugacity of a sunset in a granite boulder, emphasising in the title the exact moment when she took the picture on her iPhone. “Split Stone (7:34)” appears among the remains laden with the history of the Crypta Balbi divided into two as a natural geode: on each surface a sunset sky evokes the images present in some Chinese gongshi and in the stones spiritual subjects of the Renaissance. For this project Sze uses an innovative process, in which thousands tiny cavities etched into the granite are then filled with colored pigment, translating the techniques of lithography and needle print in a manual and meticulous work.